Patient as a monk, solitary as a bandit, lonely as an outcast, the faithful watchman dwelt by the bridge. To the gray-haired driver of the Midnight Express, whose black steed lifted him in a short half hour out of the great American bottoms, by the coal mines at Collinsville and up to the tablelands of Troy, who strained his eye around the curve at Hagler’s Tank, he showed the friendly white light. “Let her go,” it seemed to say, and the great headlight, trembling down the long grade, flashed a moment on the storm-stained face of the old watchman, and was gone again. Nor did he sleep or nod or close his eyes until the dawn of day; until he had shown the milk-white flag to the men on the White Mail in the morning.
But time will tell upon us all. It told upon the bridge, upon the old man and the mule. In spring the carpenters would come and fix and brace the bridge, that had been racked and strained by ice and flood. In spring the local doctor gave the old man something for his cough, and the old man cut a quaking asp and fixed it in the stall for the mule to gnaw; for its bark was the bitters the mule needed in spring.
At the far end of a raw, cold March the old man fell sick of a fever; typhoid-pneumonia the doctor called it, a cruel combination, either half of which could kill.
It was midsummer before he was able to take his post at the bridge again.
In the autumn he had ague that shook his bent frame and made his old bones ache. All night he would watch in the little shanty, all the morning shake with ague, and burn with fever in the afternoon.
When winter came the ague went away, but it left the old man bent and pale. His cough grew worse, and finally a severe cold put him on his back with pneumonia.
When the day set down by the doctor for a change, “one way or the other,” had arrived, the medical expert lost nothing by the prediction. Like the Oracle at Delphi that assured the king that his war would wreck an empire, without saying which empire, the doctor’s reputation was reasonably safe. As the day wore away the old man grew restless. At night the fever came on. At midnight he leaped from his bed, seized the lamp that stood upon the little table near him, and rushed out into the rain-swept night to show it to the driver of the Midnight Express. When the train had crashed over the cattle-guards at the road crossing, the watchman went back into the house, but refused to go to bed again. “I can’t go yet,” he said, “I must wait for the White Mail.”
They sent for the doctor, and the doctor told them to send for the priest.
When the dawn came the old man opened his eyes.
“Me flag,” he cried, “where is me flag?” and Mrs. Connor brought a clean white flag and placed it in his hand.